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TRANSFER STATION BUILDS SINGLE-LEVEL SUCCESS AROUND UNIQUE SENNEBOGEN MULTIHANDLER North America’s first Multihandler 305 helps Macon County, NC, to reach new heights in loading productivity and safety in a high traffic facility. |
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Franklin, NC – Chris Stahl knew what kind of changes he needed to make at his landfill facility. He just needed to find the piece of equipment that would actually make it work.
As the Director of Solid Waste Management for Macon County, NC, Stahl understood the county’s plans to decommission its MSW baling operations in 2005 and convert the facility into a transfer station. This would be the receiving facility for household trash brought in by local residents. The existing site and building dictated a single level design for the transfer station, rather than the traditional split-level type. The plan called for adding a 12 ft. push wall to the tipping floor to accommodate the top-loading trucks that would move the collected trash into the landfill area. The new push wall presented something of a barrier, though. “We didn’t know how we were going to raise the material from the floor up to the trailer,” Stahl admits. “We needed something small and nimble to move around in there but could still get the load up into a trailer at ground level.” Choices were limited for equipment that met Stahl’s aspirations for size, speed, maneuverability and the required reach for a 13 ft. loading height. As the site planning progressed, Stahl chanced onto an advertisement featuring a machine he had never seen before. “That’s certainly a unique piece of equipment!” he thought as he read about the new Multihandler 305 that SENNEBOGEN was then introducing in North America. In North America, SENNEBOGEN is known mainly for its “green line” material handling machines now widely used in scrap and recycling yards, ports and logging applications. Elsewhere in the world, the German manufacturer is recognized for its highly innovative engineering in a broad range of purpose-built material handling machines. At first glance, Stahl saw that the 305 unit might be the machine he was looking for. Similar in function to a standard telehandler, the 305 takes the concept to a new level with more power, a significantly more robust chassis plus SENNEBOGEN’s signature elevating cab.
“It looked like it fits a lot of our needs,” Stahl recalls. He got a closer look at the machine when SENNEBOGEN brought a demo model to the 2006 Waste Expo show. He was intrigued. “The elevating cab meets the safety concerns you get with public traffic on the site. You’re usually working with your back to the traffic. The elevated cab can give the operator a clear 360° of the whole area.” After the show, he checked out the manufacturer’s website, made some calls, and found that Briggs Equipment was representing SENNEBOGEN in nearby Asheville, NC. He first met with Jason LaBarbera, Briggs’ Asheville Branch Manager. Following that meeting, he then traveled to Charlotte, NC, to visit SENNEBOGEN’s American head office and parts warehouse. “Parts and service availability were concerns for us, as you’d expect,” says Stahl. “And we had to be assured of getting our techs trained on it. So we went ahead carefully.” SENNEBOGEN had its regional representative, Len Lawrence, visit the new transfer station to help the county assess the 305 for its needs. “There were a couple of other machines on the site that were under consideration – a traditional wheel loader and smaller telehandler. But the 305 was clearly the preferred machine!” Satisfied with the service assurances from SENNEBOGEN and Briggs, the county authorized the purchase and the 305 Multihandler was turned over to Chris Stahl in the Spring of 2007. Today, the odd-looking machine is the centerpiece of the Macon County transfer facility. “This is what we needed to make this operation work,” Stahl claims. “The facility is really built around what this machine can do. It’s worked out really well, and we keep finding more jobs for it to do!”
An important factor in the county’s confidence in the 305 is the history behind it. Through several meetings with the distributor and with factory staff, Stahl learned much about the service and engineering philosophies at SENNEBOGEN. The factory ensures that its staff keeps a close direct connection with customers, believing that detailed application knowledge is the key to successful innovation. Even though the 305 is unfamiliar here, he says “we have to recognize that it’s really a third-generation machine. Its European experience is very solid.” Now at home in Macon County, the operators at the facility have taken to the 305 quickly. According to Stahl, “I put in as much or more time in it than anyone in the first few weeks: nobody else wanted to be the first one to put a scratch on it! We were all pretty scared the first couple of times up in the air! When the cab is elevated and you roll over a mattress or something, you kind of feel it. But the machine is pretty user friendly. We just get it up to a comfortable height to see the ground and see where you’re dumping at the same time. Then we’ll raise it higher when the trailer is full and we’re packing it down. I still like to sneak down and run it once in a while myself!” Through the past summer and fall, Macon County has had time to test the versatility of the 305. In normal operations, the transfer station processes 15 to 20 tons of “mom & pop” trash, usually with a few short duty cycles of 3 or 4 scoops through the day. “At times, we have brought in extra material just to see what it can do,” reports Stahl. “The 305 gets through the material pretty quickly. It really takes a bite! Sometimes we’re loading a 10-yard dump truck, and we get it heaping full with 2 scoops.” The 102 HP machine has a rated lifting capacity of up to 11,000 lbs, and the heavy-duty 2-section boom can lift loads up to 29.5 ft. Operated with a single joystick, it has a top speed of 20 mph and offers three steering modes for working in confined areas. The outer wheels can turn inside a radius of less than 16 ft. The distinctive elevating cab is able to raise the operator to an eye level of higher than 13 ft. A wide range of attachments is available for easy switching between various tasks, including forklifts, an orange peel grapple, snow plow and a bale clamp. The 305’s bucket attachment has been used successfully for loading crushed glass, scrap metal and cardboard as the county prepares to increase the amount of material recovered from the waste it handles. With the addition of a wet broom attachment, the multi-tasking Multihandler has been put to work to clean the tipping floor and also to clean the roadway so mud isn’t tracked out to the public roadways. The telescoping boom has proven useful for more than getting loads up and over the push wall. The 305 has also been sent over to the county’s brush site for clean up duty when unwelcome garbage has been dumped into it. Stahl says that the boom’s reach is a big help for segregating the trash from the brush. With the 305 Multihandler, Macon County found the missing piece to make its single-level transfer station a success. Its productivity, maneuverability and safety features are uniquely suited to the operation. “The public likes this facility,” claims Chris Stahl. “And from our vantage point, they have a nice clean floor to come into so they don’t have to go right into the landfill. And we don’t have to worry about dodging all those little cars with a 25,000 lb. machine!” About SENNEBOGEN SENNEBOGEN has been a leading name in the global material handling industry for more than 50 years. Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, SENNEBOGEN America offers a complete range of purpose-built machines to suit virtually any heavy lift or "pick & carry" application. A growing network of distributors supports SENNEBOGEN sales and service across the Americas, ensuring the highest standard of professional machine support and parts availability. |
For more information on the full line of SENNEBOGEN green line material handlers including the 305 Multihandler, contact: |
Constantino Lannes, President |
- MARCH 2008 - |
